Who Knows?

Copyright, Creative Commons and the Limits of Knowledge

Share and share alike we’re told as kids, and it’s a pity we don’t always do so as adults. One of the more dubious, and most challenging, features of the Cyber Age is the promotion of intellectual property rights to the commercial extreme. Knowledge has become a commodity, and were it not for projects like Wikipedia and – let’s face it – rampant piracy, few would share the bounty of the times. But we can change that in our own small ways.

Yesterday I licensed the content of this blog under the auspices of the Creative Commons project. The details are at the bottom of the sidebar if you’re interested, and I hope you are.

I’ve included the notification button here again – just click on it to see the exact conditions of my Attribution Share-Alike licence. Horrible name, I know, but it means that you can use what I write any way you like as long as you state that I created it in the first place. And I’m also asking you to offer the results of any changes under the same licence.

I’m not expecting a general sigh of relief and a rush to quote my material – Heaven forbid! What I’m doing is lending my modest support to a worthy cause.

You might have noticed that I source most of the photos in my posts from Flickr under various Creative Commons licences. A few of you have commented on how good they are. Look closely at some of them – or better yet, go to larger versions at Flickr by clicking on the images – and you’ll notice a range of techniques used to bring out depth and emotion, to heighten colour and darken shade. That’s not just skill or art, its knowledge shared.

I’ve mentioned before that the science fiction author Cory Doctorow offers free downloads of his novels free under Creative Commons licences. Enter “Creative Commons novels” into Google and you’ll find many more from other authors. You’ll also find a link to a post by Ms. Whatsit on the value of Creative-Commons-licensed voice recordings in the classroom.

Now I’m pushing into more traditionally recognised realms of knowledge. Beyond the Creative Commons project are wikis, the best known example of which is Wikipedia, whose founder Jimmy Wales is a Creative Commons board member. Beyond that again are the many thousands, maybe even millions, of people who share their work without a second thought.

What stops corporations that trade in knowledge online from following the same path? You might be thinking about record companies or book publishers, but it can be as simple as your local newspaper.

Here in Hong Kong the South China Morning Post is one of the last great stop-outs, offering full content to online subscribers only. It hosts advertising at scmp.com, which seems to be the way of the future for free online access, but can’t bring itself to lift its self-imposed barriers.

What’s the worry at the Post? A loss of revenue? Yes, of course. As a proportion of the population, exceedingly few Hong Kongers read English language media alone, so the market is small. But that’s an irrational concern given the number of free news sites carrying similar coverage. There seems to be something less sophisticated but more powerful at work. My suggestion is, quite simply, fear.

When Francis Bacon observed that knowledge is power he also implied the contrary – that losing knowledge means losing power, relinquishing control, being stripped of status. We all experience it, sometimes at work, sometimes at home; helplessness, great or small, is the result. For a particularly paranoid newspaper publisher that loss of status would signal the loss of credibility, which could, in one vision of the world, flow over to the print edition.

And in a broader sense, that sort of paranoia feeds the copyright agenda. As BoingBoing reported at the time, three years ago Bill Gates labelled advocates of knowledge sharing “some new modern-day sort of communists” (the full interview is on CNET’s news.com). But few except the new commies really batted an eyelid. What could he have been thinking? Is this Web 2.0, the new Cold War online? The rhetoric might suggest so.

Or to look at it another way, a loss of control might just make Bill Gates look ignorant. Allow me to explain why.

We cruelly punish not ignorance but what defies it. The knowledge we acquire, for which so many men have given their freedom, their honor, and even their lives, is the greatest obstacle to our obtaining new knowledge, because the new knowledge can demonstrate that our learning is not all that learned. And knowledge that is surpassed by later knowledge, my friends, is nothing other than ignorance, and no one likes to be ignorant.

What lies beyond copyrighted knowledge? If all source code were free, what would become of Bill Gates’ ubiquitous word processor? Would we be worse off? The latest version of OpenOffice suggests not.

But still, we don’t really know, and that’s the whole point. We’re all blissfully ignorant in one way or another, particularly about the possibilities lurking in the future. I’m supporting Creative Commons – that seems like the best possible bet in this puzzling world.

Thanks Ms. Whatsit! There’s certainly a disjunction between how children are taught to behave and how adults insist the world must work. Sharing as a form of behaviour, in a purely abstract social sense, is a fundamental human value, but it’s usually condemned in specific circumstances as the underlying motivation shifts from inculcation to greed. And greed is often the basis of the most irrational fears.

Feed Me

Making a Difference

Blogging allows me to share information with and voice concerns to people from around the world. If what little I do makes a small change in someone's life, then my words have been enough.

If you would like to find out more about human rights in your region, just click on the logo to visit the Human Rights Watch website.

Handbook for Change

Reporters Without Borders offers a free handbook for people wanting to blog for change.

If you're concerned about what's happening around you and need to speak out anonymously, just click on the cover image to visit the handbook page.

The book covers the basics of blogging and how to avoid online censorship. If you know anyone else who could benefit from it, please let them know.

Domestic Helper Rights

James Rice is offering the second edition of Take Your Rights Seriously for free online. The book provides a comprehensive overview of domestic helper rights in Hong Kong, with a series of practical tips and useful contact details.

Just click on the cover above to download a copy.

Domestic helpers from other countries are particularly vulnerable to restrictions on their labour and civil rights in Hong Kong. If you know a helper who could benefit from the book, please tell her it’s available here.

Being Read In . . .

Currently Reading

In Albert’s Shadow

Compiling forty years of melodrama, remembrance, delight and pain, Milan Popovic presents the correspondence of Mileva Maric, Albert Einstein’s first wife and the mother of his three children.

Recommended

Dreams From My Father

Barack Obama vividly captures the pitfalls and triumphs of activism and the personal compromises between culture, race and identity that are needed to engage the world rather than merely live in it.

Maybe, But . . .

The New Paradigm for

for Financial Markets

George Soros might be up to the minute in his analysis of the financial crisis, but the philosophy that frames his argument seems to be lagging in unsophisticated notions of reflexivity from the 1980s.

A Note on the Material

Sharing, Not Hoarding

Most photographs on this site are used under Creative Commons licences. Move your cursor over a photo for its title and the photographer's name, or click on the image itself to visit the page from which it came.

Creative Commons is a way of sharing intellectual property and not unduly controlling it. That just has to be a good thing, and the photos really do help make Greetings Earthlings! what it is.

Now it's My Turn

I've chosen a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence for Greetings Earthlings! That means I'm happy for you to use any of the written material here as long as you acknowledge my original efforts. If you change it in any way, that's fine, but you're asked to offer the results under the same licence.

Of course, that doesn't cover any of the graphics, most of which I either don't own or didn't create. Still, combined with the similar licences offered by other people for the photographs, that's a whole lotta scope for sharing.